A Specter Haunting Europe

MasterfulAn indispensable warning for our own time. Samuel Moyn MagisterialCovers this dark history with insight and skillA major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history. The Nation For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism. It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really isA century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little. Mark Mazower, Financial Times From the start, the fantasy held that an alien elementthe Jewsaimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societiesThe writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers. Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs